Not a Fairytale

by Shaida Kazie Ali

  Zuhra has told her that the nikah will be at Aunty Anjum’s house instead of a mosque, as she wants to be present during the ceremony. Salena thinks of her own wedding conducted in a mosque between her father and Zain and the male witnesses. Perhaps Zain never married her; perhaps he’s been married to her father all these years.

  An hour into the flight Raqim, sitting on her left, is still fidgeting. He pulls down the food tray in front of him and then snaps it shut forcefully several times until the man in the seat ahead turns around to glare at him. He opens and closes his seatbelt a few dozen times, with loud metallic clicks. Then he tilts his chair into a reclining position before moving it upright forcefully, once, twice, thrice. When he attempts to do it a fourth time Salena puts a restraining hand on him and offers him a banana which he accepts, unpeels and pushes into his mouth in a single motion. It is hard to believe that he is a fifteen-year-old human. He is as edgy as Peanut Butter on the way to the vet.

  On her right, Muhammad is absorbed in a book on inventions, From Abacus to Zip. She offers him a pear, he smiles, thanks her, examines it from several perspectives for blemishes, wipes it on the front of his green T-shirt and then nips gently at the yellow skin, as though afraid of hurting the fruit. He settles deeper into his seat with a soft sigh and goes back to his book.

  Raqim has discovered the button that brings flight attendants to his side. First water, then Coke, then milk. Eventually Salena intervenes with a look of silent distress that forces him to settle down and read his book: a graphic novel about a wild horse living on the prairies of North America.

  Salena moves her seat back and relaxes, finally. She is glad that neither Zain, who says he has to work, nor her mother, who is recovering from a minor operation, is attending the wedding. She is free from their restrictions and demands. She imagines this is how birds in flight must feel.

  The Middle Boy

  There was once a second son, Luke, who despaired of his position in the centre of a trio of boys. He felt constricted as son number two; he did not have the status of his firstborn brother, Adam, nor was he the spoilt darling of the family like his baby brother Joel. He was aware that his despondency was called middle-child syndrome, but this did not make him feel any better. When Adam left to study in a far-off land, Luke wished it was his younger brother who was leaving. He was jealous of the way their mother looked at Joel with tender eyes, while he seemed to be transparent.

  One day a terrible accident befell the baby brother and he died. Luke, who had yearned for his brother’s absence, was guilty and grief-stricken; months later he still mourned his brother and watched helplessly his mother’s slow decline into depression at the absence of her precious baby.

  A year after his brother’s death he told his mother he was leaving home to seek his fortune. She seemed not to hear him, but at his departure she gave him some food and the half-grown kitten that had been born to the family cat some months before. It was a brown tabby, covered in black satiny swirls, with a perfect M marked on its forehead as though drawn by a master calligrapher.

  The first night away Luke shared his food with the cat before making a bed for himself under a leafy oak tree, while the cat curled up in a branch overhead. It was a balmy spring night and soon the boy dozed off into a dreamless sleep, only to be rudely awoken by the piping voice of his dead baby brother coming from above his head. But it was the cat, talking in its sleep. Luke’s cries awoke the mammal, who at first pretended ignorance before admitting that he was Joel, Luke’s younger brother, reborn in the form of a cat. Luke was delighted and clasped the cat to his chest joyfully. He wanted to return to their mother immediately but his baby brother said it was unlikely she would want a cat replacement for the child she missed so dreadfully.

  When morning came they continued their journey. Very soon Luke ran out of food, and had it not been for Joel’s hunting abilities, they would have starved. Weeks went by, Luke lost his puppy fat on the high-protein diet, and the daily hike defined his youthful muscles. Still, his search for work proved fruitless.

  It was almost the end of summer when the brothers arrived at a popular riverside picnic spot, where several people were enjoying the last of the warm weather. Luke noticed a beautiful young woman look him up and down disdainfully before turning away from him to join an elegant group of well-dressed people. She’d made him acutely aware of how unkempt he was: his elbows and knees poked out of the holes in his clothes, which were threadbare and too small for him. His cat-brother caught a couple of ducks for their lunch, and after eating their fill the boys rested on the banks of the rushing river.

  The warm, dozy air was suddenly filled with loud cries for help coming from the middle of the river. The brothers jumped up and saw a man in obvious difficulty in the river’s centre. Luke turned to Joel, who shook his head. He was a cat; water was the enemy. Luke briefly looked around at the other people gathered near the river. No one seemed eager to jump into the flowing waters, so it was up to him. He dove in and swam with his smooth young muscles and heaved the bedraggled man to the shallow lip of the river. The onlookers woke up as if from a mass trance, and hands helped him and the near-fatality out of the water.

  The swimmer and Luke were quickly helped out of their sodden clothes and provided with warm clothing, the richness of which Luke, accustomed to Adam’s hand-me-downs, had never known before. The same girl who had snubbed him earlier approached him and gushed her thanks for saving her father, a noted conjurer, while openly admiring the way his new attire moulded itself to his body.

  Her father approached and offered his daughter’s hand to Luke as a reward for his lifeguard duties. But Luke remembered the way she had looked at him when he was shabbily dressed and declined the offer. Instead, he told the magician that all he wished for was for his cat-brother to be human again. Hardly had the words left his mouth when Joel stepped out of a puff of black smoke, human again, looking like his twin.

  The magician also provided them with a huge bag of gold, and they returned to their mother, in a snazzy silver BMW. When the mother saw her sons she wept for joy. She was healed. Soon the older brother returned from his studies and the reunited family lived together happily, Luke secure in the magician’s parting words: “The middle child is the heart of the family.”

  Love, Unconditional

  IT’S THREE O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING, ALMOST DAWN OR, depending on your viewpoint, the darkest time of night. For Salena it is a time of ghosts and shadows. She sits, sleepless, in Raqim’s room, praying, making deals with Allah for his safe return. When he was little, all she wanted was for him to grow up, to change, so that he would no longer remind her of his dead twin. Now Salena would give anything to return him to the safety of childhood, before the onset of these teenage years which have turned him into a stranger who steals from her to answer the chemical cries of his body.

  All she wants is for him to be sleeping safely in his bed, so her imagination and body can rest. Instead, she waits, paces, watches from the window out of which he has slipped.

  In the morning, she will phone a security company to install burglar bars and an alarm system. The window will not be his escape route again. Peanut Butter glides into the room, purring, looking for an owner who no longer cares about him. It has fallen to Salena to caress and feed the once-adored pet.

  She has watched her precious but cranky son, the older twin by two minutes, go from being an outgoing, imaginative soul to an inward-looking monster, intent on his next fix. Salena has tried everything to help him, to no avail.

  Zain’s response is to beat him, and when she intervenes, flash-backs to her own childhood almost blinding her, he blames her for being too soft a mother. He says if she won’t let him hit the child, she should sort it out herself; he will no longer help.

  Another hour has vanished, and still there is no sign of him. Salena does blame herself, and the burden of the blame gives her a permanent backache that will not go away, despite painkillers and medical intervention. Maybe
after Makeen’s death she should have spent more time with the boys instead of withdrawing into her own sorrow.

  She goes downstairs and makes another pot of coffee, opens the fridge, looking for something to eat. She decides on dhania chutney and toast. While she eats, she reads the Classified section of the newspaper Zain has left lying in the kitchen. Her eye falls on the obituaries, and she recalls her obsession with reading this column after Makeen’s drowning. For almost a year, she went to the funerals of children she found in the column. She would hug the blank mothers and then cry all the way home.

  That day, in a rare moment of synchronicity, she sees an advertisement at the end of the Deaths column. A Christian-based drug rehabilitation centre on a farm in the Eastern Cape. She considers the cost of his possible recovery. If he should find Christianity but abandon drugs, it is a price she is willing to pay in gold. She sips at her coffee, sees Peanut Butter raise his face to the ceiling, and hears the thud almost immediately. Her son is home. It is precisely 4 am when she dials the centre’s number, but the voice that answers does not express impatience, only a tired helpfulness.

  When she goes up to his room, he is asleep, or pretending to be asleep. Either way, he does not stir as she packs the bare minimum of his clothes and personal necessities. At 5 am, a car from the local branch of the rehab centre arrives for him. She lets two burly men into the house and shows them his room. They escort him downstairs; he wears the frightened face of the three-year-old who buried his twin. He begs, he pleads, but the part of her heart that belongs to him has turned to ice. She turns away from his sobs, without a backward glance, carrying Peanut Butter into bed with her. And she does not visit him while he is away, even when they tell her she can.

  Salena doesn’t know what happens to him in those two years he’s gone. She thinks of him daily, but refuses to contact him. She lets go of him, as she was forced to let go of his twin.

  Seven hundred and forty two days later he is home, whole and healed, proudly displaying his matric certificate, a computer-course diploma, his blood-test results, and a horse-riding medal.

  But it is only after a further two years of clean blood tests that she stops searching his room, that she grows complacent with the milk and bread money. And only when he is awarded a scholarship by a local university does she allow her heart to melt, just a little.

  Prayer for a Loved One in Need

  1 white candle

  matches

  Very early, on the first morning after a new moon, find a quiet space and light a white candle of any shape or size. Observe the flame for a while until it burns steadily, with as few flickers as possible. When you are absolutely tranquil, visualise the person you love, who requires a fortification of his inner strength or who needs to abandon self-destructive behaviour.

  Picture your loved one surrounded by rays of light and love. Conjure up a perfect place for this person in the near future, at the end of the current period of upset in his life, where you can see him as whole, healthy and healed. Then find a warm place in your heart for him, and keep him safe.

  Repeat this process for three mornings over a period of three new moons. But remember, if he is not ready to accept help, you cannot waste your energies on him. You need to be prepared to move on, and leave him until he’s ready.

  Nazma

  SALENA IS ALLOWED TO VIEW THE BABY FOR A FEW minutes when she is pushed in her incubator, up to the glass window of the neonatal intensive-care unit. Her sucking reflex is undeveloped, so she is being fed her mother’s expressed breast milk through piping that is affixed to her nostril. Salena would like to cuddle her, but not even Zuhra can do that. Her mother has to touch her through the openings on either side of the incubator.

  The pink and white card attached to the inside of her incubator informs anyone who can read that Nazma weighed a mere one thousand and twenty grams at birth, and both Apgar tests were recorded as one out of ten. When Zuhra first sees this she moans and says to Salena that failing your first test can’t bode well for an academic life. As soon as the baby escapes the incubator, she’s burning the identification card so that Nazma never sees evidence of her stupidity. Jimmy tells her that according to the baby magazines he reads, the tests are not indicative of intelligence; they are simply to assess the baby’s health. Zuhra shudders at the mention of the baby magazines she despises and shakes her head mournfully.

  Zuhra and Jimmy come to stand next to Salena and they watch the tiny being sleeping, her hands in fists on either side of her head. Her only piece of clothing, aside from a disposable nappy that reaches up to her minute nipples, is a woolly white hat from which a dark curl escapes. Her left arm is taped in white bandage, like a mini-cast, and medication is pumped through its wrappings into her almost invisible veins. Salena tells Zuhra that Nazma looks like a microscopic angel, and Jimmy nods his agreement. Zuhra suggests that they have their eyes tested. She says the child looks like a newborn rat, minus the tail. But she smiles and says she can learn to feel fondly about rats. Then she goes off to express milk, as she has been doing every three or four hours since Nazma’s birth.

  Salena and Jimmy watch the baby for a while longer. Neither can shake off the baby-rat image. They go downstairs to the hospital’s coffee shop, and Jimmy leaves Salena alone for a minute to fetch something from his car. He returns with three bags of clothes for premature babies.

  Salena drinks two cups of coffee and eats a slice of too-rich chocolate cake while Jimmy unpacks each item of fairy-sized clothing and explains their purpose to her. She thinks of Zain’s complete indifference to the birth of his children; he never went shopping for them, never changed a nappy and never asked her how she coped with three children under two years. Her sons have grown up like the children of a single mother. Zuhra says perhaps that is why they have turned out so well: Muhammad studying medicine, much to Hafsa’s delight, and Raqim finishing his degree in science with the idea of studying veterinary science abroad – to his grandmother’s bewilderment. Salena is often overwhelmed by her love and gratitude for them.

  Zuhra finds her husband and sister drinking coffee under a heap of miniature garments, and she smiles tiredly at Jimmy as he draws her close to him. Salena, watching them from across the table, experiences a moment of heartbreak.

  A Mother’s Love

  There was once a woman who performed a magic spell to have the daughter of her longings, of her dreams. When the baby was born, she was tiny like a rosebud, ethereal as a whiff of candle smoke. The mother was horrified by her child’s fragility, and blamed herself for not wording the spell correctly. Nevertheless, she loved the little girl immediately and intensely, and cared for her tirelessly.

  One day, when the mother woke up, she found her child had been snatched out of her shoe-box crib by the toad that lived in the woman’s back garden. The same toad the woman had fed through the winter with heaps of buttered white bread. “Talk about biting the hand that feeds you,” muttered the woman to herself as she marched down to the lake that bordered their house and demanded the toad show her face.

  “I’m sorry,” said Mother Toad, “but your daughter’s really pretty, and I want my son to marry someone beautiful instead of a relative. I want good-looking grandchildren!”

  “So you kidnapped her? How dare you! Where is my child?”

  Mother Toad hung her head and explained that the girl had been rescued by a fish and a butterfly from her lily-pad prison, and had escaped before the wedding ceremony could take place.

  The woman had always been kind to animals before, caring for them, not eating their flesh, not even wearing their skins, but now she discovered a brutality in her character of which she’d been unaware; it was the fierceness of her maternal love. She placed her inelegant bare heel on the toad’s back and crushed the creature under her foot, hardly noticing the oozing slime that squelched beneath her sole as she strode off on her quest to find her daughter.

  She began by interrogating the insects. Then she found a field mouse
that had provided her daughter with shelter in exchange for housework and agreeing to marry the mouse’s neighbour, an elderly blind mole. The second arranged marriage proposition her poor child had had to endure. Mrs Mouse said a sick swallow had flown off with the girl before the wedding. The mother was livid on her daughter’s behalf. She made short work of Mrs Mouse and Mr Mole; they were soon in greener pastures. But still she could not find her daughter.

  She hired a private investigator, she visited a psychic, she approached the media for help, but to no avail. Then one day the mother heard a knock on her front door, a rat-tat-tat that she recognised instantly. She rushed to the door and there stood her baby, her daughter, still small, but all grown up, with wings, and as lovely as ever.

  “Mom,” she cried, and enveloped her mother in a hug as strong as a bear. Then she recounted her adventures, from the moment the toad (her mother had long ago got the exterminator in, and all the toads on the property had gone to watery graves) had stolen her from her mother’s side to her escape from the mole and the mouse (moles had been bombed underground, mice had been trapped) on the back of a kind swallow she’d nursed back to health. The mother decided not to mention the spell she’d been developing to ground and mute birds forever.

  Then she shyly showed her mother a sparkling ring of hardened nectar. “My prince,” she said, “of the Blossoms. My choice; my own kind. I met him in a flower, and we’ve spent a lot of time getting to know each other. He’s given me wings as a pre-nuptial gift: I can fly close to the sun, I can feel its rays on my back, the infinite blue sky is my playground. I am small, but no longer locked.”

  The mother was silent. Then she said, “Well, if you’re sure you’re happy, I’ll learn to tolerate a son-in-law.”